Desert Oud Nabeel

You read a comment about a fragrance that you assume you will never purchase, but you’re curious. You read the comment, and a kind of Leipzig mixed salad was used for the scent, which usually puts you off, but here it piques your interest. This is from a brand you had already dismissed, as both the oils for five euros and the fragrances for a mid-three-digit amount failed to convince you, culminating in a lack of ideas and expressiveness. Nevertheless, you dare to make a blind purchase, and this is for a fragrance pyramid consisting of around 500 notes.
If you know this feeling, you are obviously just as off the beaten path as I am ;) but one thing you can’t accuse yourself of with Desert Oud is that you made a bad purchase. Desert Oud is versatile, but more balanced than other fragrances from Nabeel, where everything that was available has been used.
Initially, the fruity notes come through; I can’t say exactly what lies behind them, but they must be red fruits, that much can be perceived. Strawberry, melon, raspberry, etc., I have no idea if all of that is in there, and I certainly don’t smell all of it explicitly. It could just as well be baby food or chicken feet, and I would nod and leave it at that. If it’s about being fruity, it does smell like fruit after all. The fact is, however, that this fruit basket is not sweet but comes across as synthetic-fruity, and that in a healthy measure.
Gradually, pepper sets in, and the carefree fruitiness fades away little by little. The pepper follows closely behind. Relatively quickly, the marine notes come into play. Whatever may lie behind them, I can draw two olfactory parallels: it smells of juniper with leather, which we know from Memo Irish Leather and Rasasi LY Ambergris Showers. At this point, Desert Oud lies in the middle of the two; it is not as piercing as LY Ambergris Showers but also does not possess the multifaceted depth of Irish Leather.
It’s nice to recognize something, but both are fragrances that do not win me over due to their mixture. It suits me just fine that this reminiscence has a short duration, and soon a kind of sweet-spicy, with some floral notes curtain is drawn. These sweet notes smell like full-bodied chocolate with a higher cocoa content but still under 70%, as the scent is not bitter enough for that. At first, I thought I had a specific AS from Axe under my nose, but fortunately, that was not the case, as Desert Oud does indeed have depth. Now I also ponder the previously experienced leather in a green dress. When I think about it, it was not excessive in any direction but well-measured and thus wearable for those who like Irish Leather, for example, but prefer something short-lived and softened.
A phenomenon when you want to perceive the scent on yourself is that the nose becomes relatively quickly "blind." If you test the scent with a few sprays on another person, I can empirically claim that you smell the scent very intensely. Furthermore, with the mass of ingredients, it is not the case that cascade after cascade is fired off, and you are constantly bombarded with entirely new scent impressions, like a mirage after mirage appearing while you lie in the desert sand and let yourself be intoxicated by it. The scent is multifaceted, but it does not change direction permanently.
Sometimes it gets sweeter, sometimes spicier, but at its core, it remains the same. This core is gently peeled away and smells as one would expect from Arabic ouds in the lower price segment, at least from those that are polished to bond with other ingredients. This has been quite successful, as we now have a mixture of musk and moss, with the moss enveloping the musk just right, really nothing to criticize. Many other impressions now surround this heart for me.
Whatever is truly included here at this price, the scent is finely tuned. For me, Desert Oud is carefree and will be worn when I can’t decide on anything. With this one, there’s somehow everything in it. My thanks go to Darkbeat for his comment, which caught my attention.